If I have to watch one more
Malayalam film set in an engineering college where students – mostly men – skip
classes, get into fights with rivals, mistreat teachers, ogle women and while
away their time drinking, even as the director chronicles
their lives with indulgent affection, I might retire into a hut in the
Himalayas.

Well past the halfway mark in B.Tech, just as I was about to google
real estate prices in Uttarakhand and Himachal … boom! … something happened to
draw attention back to the events unfolding on screen. Mridul Nair must explain
why he chose to devote almost two-thirds of his film to goings-on as old as the
hills in Malayalam cinema, when the sharp and politically relevant crux of B.Tech lies in the subsequent one-third.

Asif Ali in B.Tech plays Anand Subrahmanyam, an angst-ridden student of
Bangalore’s Wisdom Institute of Technology (WIT), who is now in his eighth year
in college. Engineering institutes are a dime a dozen in the city and, as he
puts it, there are more engineers in this country than there are mosquitoes. He
and his gang of layabouts make the situation worse for themselves by doing
nothing about it.

Anand is the de facto head of the
group that includes fellow students JoJo (Sreenath Bhasi) and Nissar Ahamed
(Deepak Parambol), unemployed alumnus Prashanth Puthenveetil (Saiju Kurup) and
the token woman, Ananya Vishwanathan (Niranjana Anoop). They hang out at
Fathima Café whose owner Syed Ali Kuttiparambil (Alencier Ley Lopez) dotes on
these freeloaders. Anand’s girlfriend Priya (Aparna Balamurali) is not a
no-hoper like the rest. She is perennially angry with him and he is constantly inconsiderate
towards her, but well, a hero’s gotta have a girlfriend, y’know.

Enter: Azad Mohammed (Arjun
Ashokan), a virtuous child from Payannur. He gels with them despite being a
first-year student and evidently earnest about his studies.

Azad’s arrival notwithstanding,
this is a plot filled with generic characters in a generic setting who are even
given a generic song, Ore nila ore veyil,
through which they ride around the city on motorbikes looking generically cool.
Just to prove how with-it they are, Nissar is called Puffs, Puffs leers at the
neighbour’s wife’s and daughters’ panties hanging on a clothes line, and a
bottle of hard liquor is called Sunny Leone. So hip, na?

The entire pre-interval portion
is devoted to familiar antics that are very occasionally funny, but mostly not.
The top-notch cinematography by Manoj Kumar Khatoi and overall polished
packaging matter little in such a scenario.

The acting by the youngsters and
Lopez is fair enough. Arjun Ashokan is especially sweet and gets us emotionally
involved with his Azad. Anoop Menon, on the other hand, gives a stilted performance
as Ananya’s lawyer Dad.

B.Tech inexplicably has Malayalam subtitles
embedded in the print for English dialogues but not for Hindi dialogues. Is it
this team’s contention that the film’s primary audience (read: Malayalis) understands
Hindi and not basic English? Really?

Hold your cynical horses though.
Early on we get a hint that writer Ramakrishna J. Kulur and writer-director
Mridul Nair are not ordinary minds in a scene in the WIT principal’s office in
which a teacher (Aju Varghese) gets Azad to take off his skullcap while having
no problem whatsoever with a turbanned Sikh standing just inches away. If his
was a sincere in-principle objection to external manifestations of religion,
then, err, umm…

This is a truly great moment, not
because it draws attention to Azad’s Muslim identity, but because the presence
of the other gentleman in the room along with Azad raises a question that even
liberals rarely have the guts to ask Islamophobes in India. Besides, it is so
fleeting and executed without a fuss, that for a while I wondered whether
Messrs Nair and Kulur had meant anything by it. They did. And they leave it there
to simmer in the viewer’s mind until many scenes later when Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir is referenced, once again unfussily
and in passing. Also gently woven into the otherwise run-of-mill,
over-stretched narrative is a scene at a police station I will not describe
here, and you begin to hope that at some stage this will go somewhere other
than the boring route taken by innumerable Mollywood campus flicks.

It does. And when that happens, B.Tech fearlessly shames an Indian establishment
steeped in prejudice against the Muslim community. Unfortunately the film takes
too long to get to its politically explosive portion, and even when it does,
the treatment of the sensitive matter is infused with commercial cinema
conventions. For instance, in a scene that is designed as a nod to the
scorching intensity of Kanhaiya Kumar’s azaadi
slogans, actors pose around looking grim and a looooong song plays loudly in
the background when the police charge at them.

Storywise, B.Tech has so much going for it by now, but subtracts from its own impact
by stressing and restressing every point made either by showing characters play
out episodes already recounted by others or with its high-decibel soundtrack
that is used to underline emotions and actions already conveyed by the actors.

Having come out admirably with
all guns blazing in its condemnation of Islamophobia within the police, B.Tech falters when a lawyer slams a
policeman in court for stereotyping an entire community because of the crimes
of a minority among them. No doubt this is a well-intended statement, but offered
as it is without any addendum, it is also not far removed from the “all
terrorists are Muslims but all Muslims are not terrorists” cliché in a world
where a bearded, brown-skinned chap engineering a bomb blast will automatically
be deemed an aatankwaadi / teevravadi, but the President of a
global superpower does not earn the same label despite invading a foreign
country under the pretext that it was hiding weapons of mass destruction, and within
India, the tag is yet to be bestowed on those who plan ‘spontaneous’ beef-related
lynchings and ‘riots’ in which minority community members are raped and
murdered.

In its analysis of communal
politics then, B.Tech is unexpectedly
evolved, but not enough. Its failure to take its liberalism to a higher level
might still have been excusable considering the real-life context in which it
has been made, where open expressions of hatred are now so prevalent that any
gesture of reconciliation comes as a relief. What is inexcusable though is the way
the film lazily ambles through an unoriginal campus set-up for what seems like aeons
before getting to the point.

A glass half empty could be
viewed as half full by an optimist. B.Tech
is a glass two-thirds empty. It takes more patience than I possess to view it as
one-third full.

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About Me

Anna MM Vetticad is an award-winning journalist, journalism teacher and author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, an overview of the Hindi film industry presented through an account of a year in which she watched every single Bollywood film released in India’s National Capital Region. A journalist since 1994, she has worked with India Today, The Indian Express and Headlines Today. At HT she hosted her own interview show Star Trek which drew all India’s eminent entertainment personalities. While Anna has spent most of her career as a behind-the-scenes editorial person, she has also reported on most major Indian entertainment and lifestyle events and several international ones including Cannes and the Oscars, in addition to being the film critic for Headlines Today. She is currently reporting and writing for multiple publications on cinema and social issues with a focus on gender concerns. The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic is available on amazon.com, ebay.in, flipkart.com, ombooksinternational.com, ombooks.com, infibeam.com, homeshop18.com and dialabook.in among other websites, and in stores across India. Twitter: @annavetticad